DSM

As some readers may know I currently work in Higher Education and while all of the business data is trivial to backup providing any level of backup service to students and academics is significantly harder. The challenges faced include the myriad of Operating Systems in use (Windows/OSX/Linux), the fact that the devices being backed up are inherently ‘untrusted’ (i.e. owned by the individual) and that they are often on networks (be it eduroam/public/home) that have no direct connectivity back to the internal trusted network.

Most enterprise class backup systems just aren’t suited to this kind of environment in that they cannot be securely published through a firewall or have exorbitant licencing costs for the number of devices to be protected (a few file servers vs 500+ student owned laptops).

One solution to this issue cropped up at a recent trade show where Synology were demonstrating their Synology DiskStation Manager NAS software which set itself apart from the traditional enterprise backup solutions with…

Support up to 16,000 users on high end models (and 2048 on the kind of model that we would consider using) with no extra licencing costs, users can have storage quotas set either by group or per user

Secure remote access (simply publish a single port which can be protected by HTTPS for encryption in transit)

Home grown backup clients for modern versions of Windows, OSX/macOS and Linux

On the point of OSX/macOS the backup client for Synology does not rely on Time Machine and so overcomes the issues associated with having to be on the same network as your backup device

Home grown Btrfs file system which auto detects (and fixes) corrupted files through metadata along with extensive snapshot support

Up to 32 recovery points and real-time file protection (when connected to the DiskStation)

So time for some screenshots! Below we have the initial setup of the Disk Station Manager and the installation of the client on a Windows PC.

Then restoring a file that has been deleted on the Windows PC; note that you can restore either individual files or entire folders to a point in time.

The same but for OSX…

So that’s all of the good, the only downside we have found thus far is while shared drives can be protected with encryption it is not possible to protect each individual home area (per user) with a unique encryption key thus opening up issues with data privacy. However, if you consider the following scenario…

A business needs to provide backup to remote workers

Those remote workers do not connect to the trusted network often

Perhaps they don’t like VPNs/DirectAccess (and so rules out using Offline Files)

and those remote workers do not use a commercial ‘cloud’ service to protect their data with

Perhaps trusting a 3rd party to host the data is not an option

The remote workers use OSX/macOS

…then using a Synology DiskStation should be a serious consideration for that business.